Streuselkuchen

One of my absolute childhood favorites: the home-baked Streuselkuchen. It consists essentially of three layers: A bread-like "carrier" layer, whose sole purpose is to carry as much of the Streusel "substrate" as possible. The Streusel is held to the carrier layer by a layer of abricot jam.

Base:
450g flour
2dl milk
yeast
1 soup spoon sugar
salt
100g butter (soft)
Abricot jam

Streusel:
200g ground hazelnuts
150g butter
250g flour
2 soup spoon sugar

combine milk (warm), yeast and sugar, add flour, salt, butter, combine into dough, let rise 1-2 hours, flatten onto baking sheet. Cover with abricot jam.

Combine the Streusel ingredients and produce the Streusel by pressing together little chunks.

Chocolate cake

Again a recipe from my sister (well, actually one of her cookbooks).

125g butter
6 egg yolks
150g sugar
125g dark chocolate
6 egg whites
250g ground almonds
50g flour
1 teaspoon baking soda

beat egg whites until a foamy mass forms. Mix everything in the indicated order and put in form. Bake 45-55 min at 180ºC (400F).

Chocolate icing

120g dark chocolate
3 teaspoons water
30g butter
2-3 teaspoons sugar

combine chocolate and water and let melt in a waterbath. Add butter and let melt. Add sugar and immediately cover the cake using the back of a spoon.

Kotletki

For this dish, we use the Russian name, although in reality these are just (European-style) hamburgers. The difference to American hamburgers is that in addition to meat, there are eggs, bread crumbs, and, if desired (and the children definitely don't desire) finely chopped onions.

1 package of ground chicken (preferably, for me; of course any other meat can be used)

a little salt

2 eggs

bread crumbs

1 finely (hey, or not so finely, as I prefer; or omit, if cooking for children) chopped onion

mix everything together, and add as much bread crumbs to give it a dough like texture. Make little patties using a soup spoon. The patties should be pretty thick (about 2.5cm (1") and about twice that in diameter).

Pour bread crumbs on a pile in the center of a plate and roll the patties in it. This will make a nice crust.

Fry in hot olive oil for about 6 minutes on each side, turning often.

Not unexpectedly, children like it with a lot of ketchup... great sides are rice and broccoli.

Butterzopf

Another recipe provided by my sister... the famous Butterzopf. A cornerstone of the Sunday morning breakfast, this specialty bread is as tasty as it looks. Recently I had the opportunity to go through the recipe. So here it is.

Butterzopf dough:

4 cups (1kg) flour

3 dl milk

60g butter

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons sugar

fresh yeast 20g (actually I used 1/2 teaspoon of dry yeast)

1 egg

combine into dough

let rise

make two dough 'sausages' to create the zopf. The actual "zopfing" process is quite difficult to explain. A video of the process is available here .

Paint the Zopf with egg yolk. OK, that was a bit too much. (A confectionary brush would help!)

Put in the cold oven 220C (425F) 30-40 min

The result: quite appealing. Very rustic looking, certainly not the most beautiful Zopf ever, but extremely tasty!

Children's favorites

What are favorite children's foods?

I have found that the following are favorites:

1) Pasta

2) Corn on the cob

3) Melted cheese sandwich

4) (surprise!) Artichokes (fun to eat!)

More puff pastry recipes

Speaking of puff pastry sheets - this has inspired my sister to send a couple of recipes, one of which I have been cooking for a long time, but the other was new to me. The message is that with puff pastry, you can also make magnificent piroshki-like items, filled with things such as broccoli or feta cheese. Personally, I have cooked the variety with mushrooms since the dawn of time.

Broccoli-piroshki

cook broccolis, crush with a fork, mix with ricotta cheese, and eggs.

take the puff pastry sheets and make holes with a fork. Then pile the mixture on one half of the sheet and cover with the other half. Bake for 20-30 minutes at 200C (400F).

The filling can also be made with mushrooms (grill onions, then add mushrooms, add ricotta), or with feta cheese (ca 200g feta cheese, 2 eggs, mix well).

Unfortunately, these items have so far proven unpopular with the children!

Müesli

A great way to start the day is müesli, or Birchermüesli, as it is sometimes referred to, after it's proponent, the Swiss physician Bircher-Benner, who concocted it for the patients in his hospital. It is our traditional Sunday morning dish. Of course, you can buy a müesli mix, but you will end up eating a lot of sugar, as these mixes are way over-sweetened.

Having experimented with müesli for years, I finally found the perfect recipe, and interestingly, unbeknownst to myself, it is very similar to Dr. Bircher's own original recipe, which is similarly simple.

Of note is also that the word "Müesli" is one of the very few Swiss German words that have gone international... (another unlikely word from Swiss German origin is "Putsch" (as in overthrow of a government)).

Mix:

2-3 cups of oats (Quaker Oats work just fine)

1-2 small vanilla yoghurts

coarsely grate an apple into the mix

add a handful of dried and chopped dates

add organic milk to get the müesli consistency

Of course you can expand this basic recipe with whatever your heart desires: cut strawberries, banana pieces, dried raisins, cherries, whatever. However, I have to say that I really like the plain variety a lot.

Apple tarts

One of the simplest things to make is apple tarts, using pre-made puff pastry dough. Puff pastry dough is exceptionally difficult to make on your own, so you don't need any excuses to buy one. I use Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets. (I'm sure we'll meet the puff pastry cups in a later post!)

Thaw the puff pastry sheets and cut them in stripes of about 7.5cm (3in). Slice up an apple and arrange the slices on the dough. (Of course you can also use pears, peaches, or apricots...)

Bake for 15-20minutes at 400F (200C).

Often, the baked apple tarts are covered with confectionary sugar, but this is not really necessary.

I would like to know how to put some almond paste between the dough and the apple slices...

Quiche

Experimenting with quiche here.

Crumbly dough:

1 1/4 cups of flour

salt

4ounces of butter (about 100g) - actually, after tasting it, I think half of that would also be enough!

6 teaspoons of water

mix dry ingredients, add butter (soft), add water, put together the dough. Let stand for 20 minutes in a cool place.

Flatten dough and put in the greased form (use olive oil).

Use a cup of milk (this replaces cream - fewer calories!), 4 ounces of grated parmesan or cheese of taste, pepper, cut ham, fried mushrooms, fried onions, or what else you can think of, 4 eggs, mix everything well. Pour into the dough in the form.

Bake for 45min at 400F or until nicely golden and crusty.

This is great with a salad. Needs yet to get children-tested!

Noodle gratin

This is one of my all time favorites, called 'Schinkenflöckli' in my family. It is basically a noodle gratin. Easy to make and extremely tasty, especially the crust...

Cook wide egg noodles according to instructions.

In a bowl, mix 1 1/2 cups of milk and 3 complete eggs, mix well. Grate some Gruyere cheese into the mix, add pepper and salt to taste (note that if you add cheese, that will already contain some salt, so don't add too much). Cut ham into approx 1cm squares and add to the mix. Mix with the noodles and pour into gratin form.

Grate Gruyere cheese (coarsely) onto the gratin. This will make the nice crust. You almost can't put too much there!

I recently read that other recipes call for greasing the form with olive oil and sprinkling it with bread crumbs. Sounds like a good idea. Other recipes call for beating egg white and covering the form with that (on top of the crumbs), then adding the rest.

Bake in the oven at 425F for 50 minutes.

Pizza

Next to pasta, pizza is another children's favorite. However, you don't need to order a pizza, you can create your own from scratch in less time it takes to deliver one (provided you got the dough going in the morning!).

Pizza dough recipe:

4 1/2 cups of flour
1/4 cup of olive oil
1 3/4 cup of water
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of yeast

combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, mix well with a fork. Add the water and the olive oil. Mix again, knead a little, form a ball with the dough. Let it stand from 1 hour (absolute minimum) to as much as 12 hours.

It is also popular to buy the sauces, which again is completely unnecessary. If you don't have fresh tomatoes, use canned tomatoes. Cook for 10-20 minutes, add some olive oil, salt, and pepper. That's it!

Use grated mozzorella cheese and anything else your heart desires... mushrooms, ham, onions, peppers, although children usually like it quite plain. Applying the sauce and the toppings to the pizza is an activity that children really adore.

Basics

It is true that these days it is difficult for parents to provide healthy food for children, as manufactured foods and junk food are tempting from all corners. Needless to say, these should be avoided at all cost. In addition, I try to follow these three simple rules to make things easier and healthier, not necessarily in any particular order:

1. No TV in the house, because advertisements target children with bad food choices (anything interesting to children is on youtube or netflix anyway!).
2. No softdrinks in the house, because they don't provide any nutrition, just empty calories, and are a major contributor to child obesity and tooth decay.
3. Meals are always eaten together at the family table.

Make your own bread!

One of the most important things you can easily make yourself is your own bread. It is astonishingly easy to make, and no special equipment beyond a normal oven is needed (forget bread making machines!). Most people fear making bread because of the kneading. However, the following recipe does not require kneading. No need for kneading! (one of my favorite English sentences).

Making bread yourself has a lot of advantages. For one, it is much healthier. Bread you buy in the supermarket contains upwards of 20 ingredients, most of which are stabilizers, which are not necessarily healthy. They even manage to sneak high fructose corn syrup into your bread somehow... another reason is just the quality of the bread. If you have a good bakery close to you, good for you. For those that don't, and would like a bread with great texture and crust, you have to roll your own. Finally, it could save you, admittedly, very little, money.

A basic bread has only four ingredients: flour, yeast, salt and water. Of course, you can add more things, and different types of flour, but I like sticking to the basics!


The bread recipe is as follows:
combine 4 cups of flour (for example 3 cups of white flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour) with 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of yeast and mix well. Add 2 cups of water (a little more if you increase the whole wheat flour proportion) and mix well. It should be a kind of viscous mass, not a dough that you can manipulate (it's very sticky). Let rise for 8-18 hours (in an emergency, as little as 2 hours will also work). Pour into a heat resistant cake form that is greased with olive oil and dusted with flour. Bake at 425F for 50 minutes.

I obtained this recipe originally from Peter. He has it on his facebook page.